3 Answers
3

Nice value is a user-space and priority PR is the process's actual priority that use by Linux kernel. In linux system priorities are 0 to 139 in which 0 to 99 for real time and 100 to 139 for users.
nice value range is -20 to +19 where -20 is highest, 0 default and +19 is lowest.
relation between nice value and priority is :

PR = 20 + NI

so , the value of PR = 20 + (-20 to +19) is 0 to 39 that maps 100 to 139.

According to top manual:

PR -- Priority The scheduling priority of the task. If you see
'rt' in this field, it means the task is running under 'real time'
scheduling priority.

NI is nice value of task.

NI -- Nice Value The nice value of the task. A negative nice
value means higher priority, whereas a positive nice value means lower
priority.Zero in this field simply means priority will not be adjusted
in determining a task's dispatch-ability

Edit:
By default when a program is launched in Linux, it gets launched with the priority of '0'. However you can change the priority of your programs by either of the following methods.

Are you saying, they are almost the same thing in reverse (both represent priority) BUT niceness can be used to give a negative priority so that task with the niceness gets out of the way of high priority tasks ? (ie it is being nice and letting other access resources ? Or did this just confuse me ?
– Mark KirbyAug 5 '15 at 9:59

1

An example of what I mean, two tasks, both have pr of 20, so equal, task one has a ni of 0 and task two has an ni of 20, so, this would mean that task two would give up resources for task one because it is nicer
– Mark KirbyAug 5 '15 at 10:05

PR=20+NI maximum value can be 39 . actually in linux system there is 139 priority in which 0 to 99 is real time priority and for user there is 100 to 139 . so , NI value -20 to +19 maps to priority 100 to 139 . that you can adjust . but still kernel not sure if you change NI value then it will change priority , NI value is a just suggestion to kernel . kernel some time ignore it
– pl_rockAug 5 '15 at 10:50

1

So is PR and NI are actually equivalent, as they've just a different offset? Why do we have both values then? And you could add that setting niceness of a process <0 requires root rights.
– Byte CommanderAug 5 '15 at 12:22

What is Priority and Why Should I Care?

When talking about processes priority is all about managing processor time. The Processor or CPU is like a human juggling multiple tasks at the same time. Sometimes we can have enough room to take on multiple projects. Sometimes we can only focus on one thing at a time. Other times something important pops up and we want to devote all of our energy into solving that problem while putting less important tasks on the back burner.

In Linux we can set guidelines for the CPU to follow when it is looking at all the tasks it has to do. These guidelines are called niceness or nice value. The Linux niceness scale goes from -20 to 19. The lower the number the more priority that task gets. If the niceness value is high number like 19 the task will be set to the lowest priority and the CPU will process it whenever it gets a chance. The default nice value is zero.

By using this scale we can allocate our CPU resources more appropriately. Lower priority programs that are not important can be set to a higher nice value, while high priority programs like daemons and services can be set to receive more of the CPU’s focus. You can even give a specific user a lower nice value for all of his/her processes so you can limit their ability to slow down the computer’s core services.

In your example, the renice 10 would also work without sudo, right? And could you please add an example to make all processes of a specific user more nice? That would be actually pretty useful if somebody else is logged in at the same time and has some unnecessary but resource-eating processes running (like a paused flash-game in Firefox, little brothers do such stuff... :-/ )
– Byte CommanderAug 5 '15 at 12:25

How do I restore the old niceness values of that user after a while? Setting it back to 0? That won't take into account that some processes might have had a different niceness value before. Is there any simple possibility to do this?
– Byte CommanderAug 5 '15 at 13:04

@ByteCommander No, it's not simple. Either you use 0 or … there is the problem ;)
– A.B.Aug 5 '15 at 13:11

@ByteCommander but I could write a script for that ;)
– A.B.Aug 5 '15 at 15:09

There are 2 types of processes, the normal ones and the real time
For the normal ones (and only for those), nice is applied as follows:

Nice

The "niceness" scale goes from -20 to 19, whereas -20 is the highest priority and 19 the lowest priority. The priority level is calculated as follows:

PR = 20 + NI

Where NI is the nice level and PR is the priority level. So as we can see, the -20 actually maps to 0, while the 19 maps to 39.

By default, a program nice value is 0, but it is possible for the root user to launch programs with a specified nice value by using the following command:

nice -n <nice_value> ./myProgram

Real Time

We could go even further. The nice priority is actually used for user programs. Whereas the UNIX/LINUX overall priority has a range of 140 values, nice value enables the process to map to the last part of the range (from 100 to 139). This equation leaves the values from 0 to 99 unreachable which will correspond to a negative PR level (from -100 to -1). To be able to access to those values, the process should be stated as "real time".

There are 5 scheduling policies in a LINUX environment that can be displayed with the following command:

The scheduling processes could be divided into 2 groups, the normal scheduling policies (1 to 3) and the real time scheduling policies (4 and 5).
The real time processes will always have priority over normal processes. A real time process could be called using the following command (The example is how to declare a SCHED_RR policy):

chrt --rr <priority between 1-99> ./myProgram

To obtain the PR value for a real time process the following equation is applied:

PR = -1 - rt_prior

Where rt_prior corresponds to the priority between 1 and 99. For that reason the process which will have the higher priority over other processes will be the one called with the number 99.

It is important to note that for real time processes, the nice value is not used.

To see the current "niceness" and PR value of a process the following command can be executed:

top

Which shows the following output:

In the figure the PR and NI values are displayed. It is good to note the process with PR value -51 that corresponds to a real time value. There are also some processes whose PR value is stated as "rt". This value actually corresponds to a PR value of -100.